Encrypting internal RESTful requests between micro services

[chenlica]

There are many internal RESTful requests between micro services in the Texera system. We want to know whether we need to encrypt these requests to make them more secure.

@parshimers @madhusudancs and others: any thoughts?

[parshimers]

I think between services, there should be encryption, one way or another. It can easily be the case that different services are on different machines. In this case it can be important not only for privacy, but for stopping someone from injecting spoofed messages between the two services.
How this is done more concretely, I am a little less certain of. Asterix implements the ability to have certificate auth between all nodes in the cluster, which wraps all the IPC. However this was implemented before k8s was popular and basically assumes it can be running on bare metal. If you assume everything will always be running in k8s if it's distributed, then I think you can use a service mesh like istio that presents a proxy on each pod that manages the encryption separately. Which would be a lot more convenient than having to add this functionality internally and figure out some way to deal with all the certificate management. I'd be interested to hear Madhu's take on that idea however.

[dzueck]

I have been able to show that using packet sniffing tools like tcpdump and Wireshark, the traffic between services does leak potentially private information such as data set names and contents. There is likely more, but I did not look for any more. In my case I had root access to the deployment to view the tcp communications, however as parshimers mentioned, you would not need root privileges to read these packets if services are spread out on multiple machines. In this setup you would only need a separate device on the same network as one of the services.

[aglinxinyuan]

Are you assuming that it's http? What if we use https? I don't know much about how does tcp layer work, but I guess the certificate can provide encryption at application layer.